


stubborn kind of fellow

by aertisu



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Endgame Spoilers, Other, post-Avengers: Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 06:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18615214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aertisu/pseuds/aertisu
Summary: the summary is in the notes. i do not wish to spoil.





	stubborn kind of fellow

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a Peggy/Steve fic really. Implied Steve/Tony, perhaps one sided (it wasn’t one sided).
> 
> Other tags: time travel, messing with the timeline maybe, Pining, mention of Ikea

He’s happy. That’s not a lie.

The life they settle into together is just about as perfect as it can be. They have a home, and it’s full of warmth and joy and Steve gets a good night's sleep, every night, Peggy breathing softly beside him.  New York in the seventies is in some ways a bigger adjustment than when he thawed in 2010. It’s familiar and not at all; seedy in ways he’d skipped right over the first time. But the city never  _ really  _ changes, not the soul of it, and it still feels like home.

At first, the only thing to be put-out over is that he, once again, is in a era with the  _ Los Angeles  _ Dodgers. It stings more the second time around. 

When he visits the docks him and Bucky used to play on when they were kids, throwing each other into the water before the cold of the Atlantic could stir something more icy inside him, they’re still docks. They’re in disrepair - the whole city is, really, falling apart brick by brick, beam by beam - but it’s not a goddamn  _ Ikea.  _ That big ugly blue building plopped right on the shore of his fondest memories. 

The record store him and Buck used to frequent is still where he left it, right on the corner a few blocks up from his old apartment. That’s where he goes, in the winter of 1972, to pick up  _ Trouble Man _ , the day it comes out. He tucks the album into his coat, to keep it out of the falling snow, and everytime the train slips and sways on the way home the edges of it press against his chest. Steve knows all the music already, but it washes over him as new as it is for the rest of the world. The pencil he’s holding moves across the paper without him knowing what he’s sketching until it’s finished. When he realizes, there’s another, sharper pain in his chest. It’ll be six years before Sam is even born.

But he’s there in Steve sketchpad, wings stretched out across an empty sky. Just like they all are on every page. Folks he loves, some of whom haven’t come into the world yet, and  _ their  _ children, playing in a sunlit family room on a farm. Or pressed against her father’s chest, his big arms wrapped around her protectively. 

“Do you want coffee, darling?” Peggy asks, her voice ringing from the other side of the house. “Or tea?” 

Sometimes Steve tries to draw her, too.  _ Morgan.  _ But he can never get her face right, it never looks enough like her to soothe the ache in his chest. She’s fine, she  _ will be fine _ , he knows that, and he had no obligation to a daughter that wasn’t his. But he hopes Pepper and Happy and Rhodey, whoever she has and keeps in her life, tell her the right stories. Not just the big things, but the small ones. How her father cared, and cared, and loved so big in such tiny ways. 

“Steve? Coffee?”

Ways it took him to the end of the universe to see clearly. 

“Sure, Peg,” he calls out to her. “Coffee’ll be great.”

He closes the sketchbook when Peggy comes to sit with him, even though she’s seen it all before. Lovely in the midday sun, she pulls the book towards her and flips it open anyway, and Steve lets her, the way he always does. Even though it makes him feel raw and more vulnerable than the rare nights he actually  _ tells  _ her a story or two. There’s something intimate about the lines of their faces, the hint of a smile at the corner of Nat’s mouth, the ageless depths of Thor’s eyes, the strong lines of Tony’s back, hunched over his workbench. It makes him worry she’ll see too much, or not enough. That somehow she won’t understand. 

“They’re beautiful,” she says. Her fingers trace over the curve of Wanda’s face. Gently, as if to comfort. “So delicate. And sad, almost.” 

She’s talking about Wanda. At least Steve thinks so. 

Peggy pauses, the way she always does, when she gets to a drawing of Tony. Besides Bucky, he’s the only person in the book she knows. As much as anyone can know a seven year old boy.

“There’s so much of Howard in him now,” she says, not for the first time. “I barely see any of it in your drawings.” 

“I never saw Howard,” Steve says. Stirs more sugar into his coffee. “Tony was… his own man.”

“Of course.” Peggy slides her hands across the table to his and holds one of his tightly. “You could change your mind, you know. Come around for lunch one day. Howard would be thrilled to see you.” 

Steve can’t say the same. He liked Howard well enough when he knew him, but all his memories of that man have been rewritten by what he became. By what he’s becoming now. And there’s a fear - a real, biting fear - inside him that if he lets himself too close to the Starks he won’t be able to sit back any longer. 

How can he see them, be a part of their lives, and not  _ change anything.  _ To at least try to set Howard on a better path. To tell a little boy that he promises -  _ Captain America promises  _ \- things won’t be bad forever, when he knows it’s a lie. When he knows.

It’s decades away, but Steve already has sleepless nights where he wonders whether or not he’ll be able to stand by as Bucky murders Tony’s parents on the side of a dimly lit road. Even now, he doubts it. 

Steve spreads his fingers out, until Peggy intertwines them with her own. “I can’t see him,” he says, knowing Peggy won’t think he’s talking about  _ Howard. “ _ I -. _ ”  _

The words catch in his throat and for a moment Steve considers letting them stay there. But it does no good to withhold this from Peggy. Not when she’s so open to him, for him, accepts all the burdens he’s willing to share and helps carry the weight of them. 

So he takes a deep breath. 

“ _ He gave me this,”  _ Steve whispers, and squeezes her hand. “With barely any strings attached. A second chance. I can’t see his face, knowing the sacrifice he made for it. For me. For all of us. And not - not try to protect him from it.” 

“Then  _ protect him,  _ Steve.”

His hands chill when he pulls away from her. As cold as the bottom of the ocean. 

“You  _ know  _ I can’t,” he says, and it hurts. In his stomach and throat. The shape of the words hurt in the inside of his mouth, cut into his cheek. Like chewing on razor blades. 

Peggy leans away to sit up straight. Her eyes are bright and piercing and Steve wants to look away, but can’t. Doesn’t want to talk about this, but  _ wants to,  _ needs to _ ,  _ desperately, with every inch of his being. 

“Sometimes protecting someone is simply handing them a shield.”

There are things he could tell Tony. Steve could tell him he’s brave and strong and that his life will never truly be easy, but there will be so much  _ good  _ in it. That he’ll hurt people, because all people eventually hurt each other, but he has the power to protect them, too. Could tell Tony that no matter what anyone says about him, despite all the things they’ll want from him, things that might make his belly hurt and his eyes burn, he’s worth more than he knows and what they think. Not just his brains, but his heart; a heart that’s enough to save the universe. 

He could tell him that so many people love him. People he hasn’t even met yet. They’ll love him so much they’d follow him to the end of everything. They’ll love him for exactly who he is. Because of who he is.

Steve could give him a shield. 

Something strong enough to keep out Howard and the other demons that rattled around his brilliant head. 

“I could give him a shield,” Steve repeats. 

His hand finds the sketchbook and he curls his fingers around the binding, around the dozens of drawings of Tony. Tony, who was so much, burned so bright, for a while not even his own heart could bear it. A man who Steve loved, right down in his bones, a feeling so big he never knew how to hold it. Didn’t know how to  _ feel _ it until he had to let it go. 

He’s happy. That’s not a lie.

But there are wrongs he could correct. Times when situations will go south that he can’t ignore. That he doesn’t want to ignore. 

And Peggy is teaching him: There are other ways to fight. 

And Steve can do this all day. 


End file.
